Immortal Monster (A True Crime Short)

Anthony Bruno

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In Brief

Contract killer, lethal scam artist, loving father, abusive husband, abused son, convicted murderer, liar, TV star — “The Iceman” was all of those. Immortal Monster reveals why this man still fascinates five years after his death and 25 years after his apprehension and how much truth there is to his legend.

Overview

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Praise

Press Kit

Overview

Contract killer, lethal scam artist, loving father, abusive husband, abused son, convicted murderer, jailhouse schemer, liar, TV star. The man they called “The Iceman” was all of those. In 1988 he was sentenced to life for four gruesome murders, but this was just the tip of his iceberg. He had a taste for esoteric methods of death ─ favoring a cyanide solution in a nasal spray bottle ─ and body disposal ─ freezing one of his victims to disguise the time of death. At one point he bragged that his personal body count was over 200, seven times the more likely number.

Still, he has huge following, and a biopic based on his life is about to start shooting this fall. The Iceman told his story in three extremely popular HBO documentaries, which are still broadcast regularly. Why does the Iceman’s story continue to fascinate the public five years after his death and 25 years after his apprehension? And how much of his legend is truth?

Anthony Bruno is an expert on the Iceman after researching and corresponding with him for over two years. His full-length book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer is the basis for an upcoming feature film set to roll starring Chris Evans (“Captain America”), Ray Liotta (“Goodfellas”), Winona Ryder, and Michael Shannon (“Boardwalk Empire”) as the Iceman. Bruno is currently serving as executive producer for The Iceman feature film.

Anthony Bruno is also the author of The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story with Joshua Armstrong, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. Bruno has authored over 50 articles for Time Warner’s Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. Bruno also assisted with film adaptation of his novel, Bad Apple, for Turner Network Television. He acted as consultant to the producers and wrote key scenes.

From the best true crime authors in the business, many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures, comes Crimescape® — a new collection of compelling short nonfiction crime e-books from leading independent e-book publisher RosettaBooks. Taking readers into the dark heart of the criminal mind and the tense hunt to bring perpetrators to justice, Crimescape® authors stand apart from other true crime writers because they have personal experience in crime investigation, whether as police detectives, investigative reporters, forensics professionals or criminal psychologists. Riveting storytellers, Crimescape® short nonfiction writers give readers all the information they need to understand relevant clues and the interwoven influences in each criminal case.

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Foreword by Marilyn Bardsley

Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski was a mobster and contract killer with an extraordinary imagination. When it came to dreaming up new and exotic ways of killing, he was an artist in a career dominated by gun-toting thugs. He defied all of the mob stereotypes. Kuklinski seemed like a reasonable, trustworthy businessman that people would believe when they bought into his too-good-to-be-true deals. He aspired to be a killer of “important” people like Jimmy Hoffa, instead of run-of-the-mill contract victims whose deaths barely made headlines in the local news. His lust for notoriety seemed greater than his lust for money when he claimed that he killed over 200 people, many times more than could ever be substantiated. He was clearly not involved in some of the most high-profile killings.

It takes an experienced author to capture the complexity of Kuklinski’s true character. Anthony Bruno communicated with Kuklinski so extensively and researched Kuklinski’s actions so thoroughly that he was able to sort out most of what was truth and what was fiction in the legend of the Iceman. His full-length book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer is the basis for an upcoming feature film starring Chris Evans, Ray Liotta, Winona Ryder, and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Shannon as the Iceman. Bruno is currently serving as executive producer for the feature film The Iceman. Bruno is well-grounded in the mob culture and has written about it extensively.

Born in Orange, New Jersey, Bruno is a graduate of Boston University where, as an undergraduate, he was accepted into Donald Barthelme’s graduate creative writing workshop. He later earned a master’s degree in Medieval Studies from Boston College.

While living in Boston, he worked as an archivist for the Boston University Twentieth Century Archives. After finishing graduate school, he moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, and started working in book publishing in Manhattan. His big break as a writer came in 1988 when his crime novel Bad Guys was published in hardcover.

Bad Guys was the first in a series of novels (Bad Blood, Bad Luck, Bad Business, Bad Moon, and Bad Apple) about FBI agents Mike Tozzi and Cuthbert Gibbons, odd-couple partners whose prime targets are New York and New Jersey wiseguys. Basing his stories on actual Mafia figures and their criminal activities, Bruno pioneered the territory that has made The Sopranos a monster hit. Rave reviews compared Bruno to Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake. People called Gibbons and Tozzi “the best fictional cop duo around.”

In 1995, Bruno wrote Seven: The Novelization based on the runaway hit feature film starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

For his next fiction series, Bruno created a new law-enforcement duo, parole officers Loretta Kovacs and Frank Marvelli of the New Jersey Parole Violators Search Unit. Loretta and Marvelli made their debut in Devil’s Food, in which zaftig Loretta goes undercover at a Florida fat farm in order to nab a crafty embezzler. The second book in this series, Double Espresso, was nominated for an Anthony Award in 1998. The latest entry, Hot Fudge, takes Loretta and Marvelli into the world of gourmet ice cream and kinky sex as they track down a criminal opportunist who’s looking to add murder to his extensive rap sheet.

The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story, Bruno’s latest non-fiction work, recounts the life and adventures of America’s most unique and most successful bounty hunter, Joshua Armstrong, the leader of the Seekers, an elite Mission: Impossible-style team whose most effective weapon is their spirituality. The Seekers was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime book in 2001.

In February 2004, a television movie adaptation of Bruno’s novel Bad Apple, starring and produced by actor Chris Noth, premiered on TNT.

Bruno wrote virtually all the stories about organized crime on Time Warner’s Crime Library.

Bruno is also a fourth-degree black belt in aikido.

Praise

“Anthony Bruno’s The Roppongi Stalker takes you deep into the strange culture of Japan’s sex and entertainment industry, where a mysterious and wealthy serial rapist and killer preys on the foreign women who work there as ‘hostesses.’

This is a gripping and weird tale of true crime gold, told by a master of the genre.” –Troy Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer

Press Kit

Press Release

“What makes for a good true-crime story? Interesting characters, an engrossing plot, situations that often teeter between life and death. But here’s the MacGuffin about true crime: What you’re reading actually happened. Sometimes truth really is more compelling than fiction. And that’s why you will enjoy reading Crimescape® true crime series.”
—Paul Alexander, the #1 bestselling true crime Kindle Singles author of Murdered and Accused

Diabolical contract killer, lethal scam artist, loving father, abusive husband, abused son, convicted murderer, jailhouse schemer, liar, TV star — “The Iceman” was all of those. IMMORTAL MONSTER by Anthony Bruno reveals why Richard Kuklinski continues to fascinate the public five years after his death and 25 years after his apprehension, and how much truth there is to his legend.

From the best true crime authors in the business, many of whom have seen their books made into major motion pictures, comes Crimescape® — a new collection of compelling short nonfiction crime e-books from leading independent e-book publisher RosettaBooks. Taking readers into the dark heart of the criminal mind and the tense hunt to bring perpetrators to justice, Crimescape® authors stand apart from other true crime writers because they have personal experience in crime investigation, whether as police detectives, investigative reporters, forensics professionals or criminal psychologists. Riveting storytellers, Crimescape® short nonfiction writers give readers all the information they need to understand relevant clues and the interwoven influences in each criminal case.

IMMORTAL MONSTER is one of the first six releases in the continuing Crimescape® series from RosettaBooks. For an author interview or a PDF review copy, please contact:

About Anthony Bruno

Anthony Bruno has a deep interest in Japanese culture and has studied the Japanese martial art, aikido, for over 25 years. Among his many Crime Library articles is a widely reprinted piece on the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. In The Roppongi Stalker, he takes the reader into the tangled world of Tokyo’s sex trade where a charming serial rapist and killer preyed on young women to satisfy his deviant sexual desires.